Hallelujah! It’s song time

Traditionalists: Our Lady’s Choral Society perform Handel’s Messiah on the exact spot in Dublin’s Temple Bar district where it was first performed in 1742
Norman Lebrecht13 April 2012

There is only one Messiah, so unique it never needed a definite article. Handel, on the title page, called it "an oratorio" and the Dublin opening night in April 1742 was billed as "an entertainment", though that was not the composer's intention.

Written in 24 days, it played to a packed house of 700. "How zealous they are in Ireland for oratorios," wrote Handel to his librettist Charles Jennens, giving the proceeds of these first performances to three local charities.

After the London premiere in 1743, he donated all future income to the Foundling Hospital school that a sea captain, Thomas Coram, was building for abandoned children near Gray's Inn. Messiah, said its composer, was intended for the greater good. "I shall be sorry if I only entertained them," he told a first-night enthusiast. "I wish to make them better."

No work of music has conquered the English-speaking world with such force, its King Jamesian cadences enunciated by baritones in cavernous town halls, its melodies whistled by milkmen on their rounds and coalminers in the pit-shaft.

Communities in the north of England, and some in North America, hinge their social life on year-round rehearsals and a climactic Messiah at Easter or Christmas. It is a work that joins town and country, Catholics and Nonconformists, musicians and amateurs, landlord and tenant in a single act of performance.

The tradition endures, but with difficulty. On Easter Day, ITV's South Bank Show will document its struggle to survive in multicultural Yorkshire, where a vaulted church has become a mosque and a gay chorus splits over whether it is politically correct to sing religious verses.

Mathew Tucker's film is both moving and disturbing, capturing an ethos as it fades while confirming that Messiah, of all cultural edifices, still stands at the centre of the search for an evanescent Englishness, the elusive bond of national identity.

Much else about Messiah is becoming more diffuse. Handel, never daring to believe that any work of his would enjoy more than one short run, was careless with original parts and early publications. "It is extremely doubtful whether any other great musical work exists the text of which is in even approximately so corrupt a condition as that of Messiah," wrote Ebenezer Prout for a clean-up edition in 1902. Needless to say, Prout added as many new errors as he eliminated old ones and compounded them by titling the work "The Messiah", as if his version was to be definitive.

No fewer than five archival versions are being issued this month on the Warner label, ranging from Ton Koopman's austerity chorus of 16 voices to Yehudi Menuhin's romantic rendition with the state choir of Lithuania. Raymond Leppard conducts an all-English cast; Nikolaus Harnoncourt gets hiccupy rhythms from Swedish singers.

The most perverse of these attempts is a German-language Messiah prepared by Mozart, no less, in which Comfort Ye, My People loses a quintessential syllable when declaimed as Mein Volk, blunting Handel's pen-point to an ink-blot. Meddling with Messiah was a popular sport in 19th-century London, where performances grew larger and larger until Crystal Palace set a record on the 1885 bicentenary of Handel's birth with a choir of 4,000, an orchestra of 500 and 87,769 paying customers.

Handel for the masses remained the dominant style until the 1960s, when period instruments required smaller choirs and imperial pomp was replaced with much puffing on handmade horns. In the quest for a true Messiah, beauty was often sacrificed for a disputable authenticity and historical context became one-sided.

On 14 April, the 250th anniversary of Handel's death, BBC Radio 3 will relay a baroque Messiah from Westminster Abbey, where Handel is buried. Historically apt in a limited, external aspect, it ignores Handel's declared loathing for the abbey's clerical establishment. He would slam the door on bishops who came to advise him on texts for coronation hymns and used his own Bible for Messiah, taking verses from Isaiah, Psalms and the Gospels, to the despair of his librettist. "This Hallelujah, grand as it is, comes in very nonsensically, having no manner of relation to what goes before," grumbled Jennens. Handel quickly got rid of him.

When Messiah reached London, King George II rose to his feet at the Hallelujah chorus and the rest of the house stood to attention. No one knows why the King got up, whether in homage to Handel or because he thought the oratorio was over, or perhaps he was troubled by gout. Such is the strength of tradition that audiences in London — but nowhere else — stand for Hallelujah to this day.

Accretions such as these cling to Messiah like barnacles to a ghost ship, and still the work survives. Much of Handel's autograph score can be studied at the British Library and a full manuscript score and set of parts survive at the Thomas Coram Foundation. No musician in London has the excuse of ignorance.

Yet most performances that I have heard have been a mixed blessing. The quest for a perfect Messiah is a lifelong frustration, whether in concert or on record. In both cases, the choice is between big-band, modern chamber orchestra or period instruments — and none of them has all the answers. One treasured California recording from 1991, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, broke the mould of maestro power by presenting all of Handel's known variants and inviting the listener to select tracks and make your own Messiah. That, it strikes me, is the way to go.

One night, some 35 years ago, I ran up to the gods in the Royal Albert Hall clutching a Marylebone Public Library score and sang my lungs out in Messiah-from-Scratch, an attempt by academics, musicians and enthusiasts to reclaim Handel for the people. Initiated by the dormitory warden of Imperial College across the road, it had Sir David Willcocks as conductor and an orchestra of professionals and amateurs, some of whom had made their instruments in the garage the week before. I was probably not the only singer that night to lose his place several times but the exhilaration that filled the hall was intoxicating. We had brought Messiah to life, all by ourselves.

The Messiah-from-Scratch concept of annual get-togethers in a great singalong has since spread to other continents, culminating in the work's first performance in the Forbidden City of Beijing, three years ago and another in the Temple of Ramses on the Nile. The next Scratch Messiah (www.trbc.co.uk) is at the Albert Hall on 15 November. Start practising now and I'll see you in the gods.

Five Messiahs worth celebrating

Joan Sutherland (Decca)
Early performance with Sir Adrian Boult, mushy diction but what a voice

James Bowman (EMI)
The counter-tenor option, in a cleverly crafted performance with Sir David Willcocks

Isobel Baillie (Dutton)
"Never sing louder than lovely" on a Huddersfield traditional blast with Sir Malcolm Sargent

Bryn Terfel, Joan Rodgers, Philip Langridge, Christopher Robson (Chandos)
Luxury casting by Richard Hickox

Lorraine Hunt (Harmonia Mundi)
As a very young contralto in Nicholas McGegan's 1991 mouldbreaker

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in